Comments for Phishing Scams Seen at UD

Comment on About This Site by richard

richard — Tue, 29 May 2012 13:21:49 +0000

We post news about the worst phishing scams to our twitter feed (twitter.com/itatud) which is also repeated on our facebook page (www.facebook.com/itatud), our home page (www.it.udel.edu) and our support center’s home page (www.udel.edu/help).

Comment on About This Site by Wally Sinicin

Wally Sinicin — Tue, 29 May 2012 12:55:04 +0000

My son showed me this message about phishing scams – is the student population proactively informed through email about these scams as soon as they are identified, or do they have to check this website for updates?
If there are no proactive alerts, then I don’t believe that the majority of students will actually check here for alerts.

Comment on “Old Friend” Google Form Scam by Chris Sanger

Chris Sanger — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:00:28 +0000

I lifted the following from the udel/phishing site …

• If someone at UD sends you a Google form to complete, it will have a URL that would start with a string like this one:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/a/udel.edu/spreadsheet/
I am not questioning the intelligence of our general population but I do question their ability to actually read and determine if a link is legitimate. I see it as this …..
Oh look someone is looking for me…cool
Oh look it’s google docs, we use that at UD … click,
Ok, udid, password no problem ……..

Just think what could have happened if this phisher took 5 extra minutes and actually used a UD logo or made the sign in page look more like the central authentication page.

Comment on UDel Collaborative Networks spam by richard

richard — Wed, 09 May 2012 13:43:39 +0000

We talk about what to do in our Phishing Blues webcast, mentioned in this post to the phishing blog: http://sites.udel.edu/phishing/2012/04/25/phishing-blues-webcast/

Comment on UDel Collaborative Networks spam by Brittany

Brittany — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:16:24 +0000

What if we signed up already? Will changing my password even do anything or is it too late? I’m disappointed that we are not notified via email about these things. I’m glad I just happened to stumble upon this post but I still don’t know what to do about it.

Comment on International phone scam lands in Delaware by computers perth

computers perth — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 09:10:04 +0000

This thing is not Funny at all that even if a person has installed with the special services of “do not call” registry, that poor soul may still receive numerous calls on his land line or his cell phone from an unknown person or a computer that has dialed the number randomly. Phone scams are the easiest and most effective way of playing on with your nerves nowadays. All types of frauds, cheating, theft online and from credit card robbing to anything else is committed behind the curtain of phone scams.

Comment on Phone scam thwarted by richard

richard — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 16:21:51 +0000

News reports indicate that this kind of scam is STILL going on all over the English-speaking world. A sample report:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/story/2012/04/24/tby-computer-virus-scam.html

Even though this report is from Canada, it’s the same pattern: the scammers make multiple calls to an area code/exchange combination for a while. In short, if there’s one call in an area, it’s likely there will be more.

Comment on Phone scam thwarted by richard

richard — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 21:18:39 +0000

Yesterday, I talked to another UD employee on the phone. He told me that he has had three calls like this one in the past 10 days or so: one at work and two at home.

Scams like this one and the one we wrote about in March (http://sites.udel.edu/phishing/2012/03/07/international-phone-scam-lands-in-delaware/) are multiplying. Korinne may be right. Alerting the authorities may be a good idea. Of course, a lot of these scam calls are routed so that the origin is masked.

Comment on Phone scam thwarted by Korinne Mosier

Korinne Mosier — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 02:16:54 +0000

Good job to the employee! It should be how everybody’s supposed to handle suspicious calls. Healthy skepticism will do a lot to avoid being scammed.

Well, unfortunately, these scams continue because by assuming an identity and posing as an employee of a reputable company, somehow, scammers are able to convince somebody to provide a sensitive information over the phone. I remember reading similar reports posted at Callercenter.com and it’s a little discomforting that scammers can easily call people, try to scam them and get away with it.

Isn’t there a preventive step more assuring than government reminders? Like being able to trace calls faster and catching the culprits? Or maybe alerting the authorities right away as soon as the call becomes suspicious?

Comment on International phone scam lands in Delaware by Aaron Ward, FLL

Aaron Ward, FLL — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:35:00 +0000

Yes, we’ve had one reported case in FLL. Similar to Tom, we also
traced the call back to Bainbridge Island, Washington. Fortunately,
our user did not fall to the hoax. She also resides in the 302 area
code.

Comment on International phone scam lands in Delaware by Tom Rocek, Anthropology

Tom Rocek, Anthropology — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:16:47 +0000

We had a similar call at our house a couple of weeks ago: a man informing us that our computer was infected and he would guide us through the steps to clean it. It didn’t occur to us to take it seriously but I asked for a phone number to call him back (he provided a number with a Washington State area code … I didn’t bother trying it or checking if it was a Microsoft number, and I long since discarded it) and then hung up. Anyway, the targeting of geographic areas seems to fit! Tom

Comment on Email phishing message by richard

richard — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:21:04 +0000

Here’s another variation of this one, with the scary subject line “Deactivation of your Email Address”:

From: Cleto Yanes
Subject: Deactivation of your Email Address
Date: October 20, 2011 9:01:03 PM EDT

THIS MESSAGE IS FROM OUR TECHNICAL SUPPORT TEAM This message is sent
automatically by the computer. If you are receiving this message it means
that your email address has been queued for deactivation; this was as a
result of a continuous error script (code:505)receiving from this email
address. Click here and fill out the required field to resolve this problem
Note: Failure to reset your email by ignoring this message or inputting wrong information will result to instant deactivation of this email
address

—

In the original, hovering the mouse over “Click here” showed a link in Turkey. So, no UDel link, request for too much information, and coming from a “cityofgalveston.org” address? Delete!